Diary: Tuesday 8 February 2000

Tuesday 8 February 2000

On leaving Sukkur we crossed the barrage and joined the main Karachi – Lahore road. This road is in the process of being upgraded. For most of the way to Lahore, it is essentially dual carriageway (although in some areas there was no road at all!). The catch is that going one way (random according to where you are) the road is perfect, smooth new tar, while the other carriageway is little better than a pothole ridden track. The consequence of this is that most traffic uses the better carriageway and you end up with two roads of two-way traffic next to each other. Not handy when there are so many slow trucks, tractors and donkey carts on the roads. Having said that, the bad carriageway was shocking!

We stopped in a reasonable sized town to try and change some money before the banks shut (2-3ish). Good news – bank was open. Bad news – bank didn’t handle foreign currency. We travelled onto Multan, by which time all the banks were shut. Multan is quite a large town. We had a Lonely Planet map of the centre and attempted to navigate to the hotel using it. This resulted in us taking a very tortuous route through extremely narrow, crowded streets. Partly my misnavigation and partly inaccuracies on Lonely Planets behalf. We found the railway and then the station. Put ourselves back on track and found a hotel with secure parking. Today the phone sprang back into life with a text message from Terence – the first time we had coverage since Turkey.